Louise Slaughter an American politician elected to 16 terms as a United States Representative from New York once said, “Let’s clean up our environment, let’s clean up our bodies but most importantly, let’s not permit our babies of the future to be polluted before they are even born”.
The Nile is a primary source of water to many countries around its basin; however, it has become a garbage dump for the countries it harbors resulting in contamination of the water used for domestic use by the communities that surround its banks.
On 18th September 2021, Greenwatch launched its participation in the Nile Coalition. The aim of the coalition is to protect River Nile from pollution, particularly plastic waste. To mark the launch, Greenwatch participated in a tree-planting activity on the shores of the Nile. Trees sieve out solid wastes from flowing water into the river.
On the 12th of March, Greenwatch together with other organizations from various parts of the world celebrated the international cleanup day for the Nile under the theme “Waters have no borders”, this event was spearheaded by One Earth One Ocean and the Very Nile initiative.
In celebration of this day, Greenwatch sensitized 65 students of the environment club of Jinja Secondary School (Jinja S.S.) about how to manage plastic waste and the dangers of poor disposal of plastic waste. The celebrations proceeded with planting ten (10) tree seedlings within the school premises and a ceremonial handing over of 3 dustbins to the headteacher of Jinja S.S.
With a team of forty-seven (47) volunteers from Jinja S.S. and the community a cleanup and tree planting activity to commemorate the event took place on 13th March 2022. Forty (40) tree seedlings were planted on the Jinja roundabout grounds and later the team proceeded to clean up the banks of the Rippon pier landing site. We interacted with some of the locals who were very appreciative of the Greenwatch initiative, they promised to continue cleaning the area and educate the rest of the community members about how to keep their environment clean and healthy. At the end of the clean-up, twenty (20) sacks of waste weighing 1000kgs were collected from the landing site.
As we say at Greenwatch, “if we all did little, we would do much”, practice the little and start now by keeping your community clean to make an enormous difference in your community.